To serve as the nominal co-founders and the official co-directors of IPS, the Weisses selectedRichard J. Barnet (a State Department lawyer) and Marcus Raskin (an assistant to McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy's national security adviser). The FBI would later identify Barnet as a "communist" and "a potential espionage agent" who not only had "known contacts with intelligence agents from Soviet and Soviet bloc countries," but was "willin[g] to use his position of influence with the IPS to discredit and undermine U.S. policy, both foreign and domestic." Raskin, too, had numerous socialist and communist ties. The Capital Research Center describes Barnet and Raskin as "two disgruntled minor officials in the Kennedy administration who found the American system of government unsatisfactory and who decided to wage political war against it."

IPS's founders and leaders presented their new Institute as a benign, independent, “progressive” group committed to participating in the democratic process. Their true objective, however, was to transform the United States by pushing its public attitudes, laws, and foreign policies decisively leftward. Toward those ends, IPS worked with agents of the Castro regime and championed numerous environmentalist, pacifist, and anti-war positions in the 1960s and 1970s; it opposed the Reagan administration's efforts to roll back Communism in the 1980s; it joined the vanguard of what IPS hailed as the "anti-corporate globalization movement" in the 1990s; and it furnished policy research assailing the U.S.-led war in Iraq during the George W. Bush administration.

According to a Capital Research Center (CRC) analysis, IPS holds a "political outlook" that is "classically Marxist" and portrays capitalism as the chief cause of human suffering, not only in the U.S. but worldwide. "Since its founding in 1963," CRC elaborates, "IPS has attacked capitalism as the scourge of the poor, the economic system that props up the nation-state, and the cause of war and 'imperialism.' Only the business class—the 'bourgeoisie'—prospers under capitalism. The rest of the world suffers."

As soon as IPS opened its doors in 1963, it immersed itself in the anti-Vietnam War movement. In 1965, Marcus Raskin and IPS associate fellow Bernard Fall edited The Vietnam Reader, which became "a textbook for [anti-war] teach-ins across the country." Two years later, Raskin and IPS fellow Arthur Waskow co-authored "A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority," a document that helped launch the draft-resistance movement. Further, the Institute organized congressional seminars and published a number of books that challenged what IPS disdainfully termed "the national security state."

Also in the 1960s, IPS staked out a spot near the forefront of the emerging feminist movement and has remained there ever since. Institute fellow Charlotte Bunch organized a major women’s-liberation conference in 1966 and later founded two feminist periodicals, Quest and Off Our Backs. In the 1970s, IPS staffer Rita Mae Brown publishedRubyfruit Jungle, a lesbian coming-of-age novel. And in the early 1980s, the now-famous socialist Barbara Ehrenreich led IPS's "Women in the Economy" project.

As IPS began to establish itself as a major force on the Left, the organization's Washington, DC headquarters quickly became a resource center for national reporters, most of whom bought into the idea that the Institute was an independent liberal entity. IPS also became a place for KGB agents from the nearby Soviet embassy to convene and strategize; they frequently tried to recruit IPS members.

Before long, IPS had evolved into the leading central agency of Soviet/Marxist/socialist disinformation. This term refers to false or inaccurate information (e.g., forgeries, rumors, and fabricated intelligence) that is spread deliberately to deceive. Unlike traditional propaganda techniques designed to engage emotional support, disinformation is intended to manipulate its audience at the rational level by either discrediting certain information or supporting false conclusions. A common disinformation tactic is to mix a measure of truth and observation with false conclusions and lies, or to reveal only part of the truth while presenting it as the whole. Another technique is to destroy the credibility of particular entities or individuals by feeding them false data which, after they subsequently repeat it, can be easily disproved.

IPS deliberately used terminology designed to suggest that it was a scholarly rather than a political entity, as evidenced by its references to Institute personnel as "fellows" and "scholars." Throughout the Cold War, IPS personnel published a constant stream of op-eds, letters, and articles in such prestigious publications as The New York Times and The Washington Post, where the Institute was consistently identified as an "independent" or "non-partisan" think tank or research center. By means of this approach, IPS was able to promote the causes of America's enemies (e.g., North Vietnam, Cuba, and the Soviet Union) without preaching Marxist doctrine.

Starting in 1964 (and continuing to the present day), IPS held seminars designed to persuade U.S. congressmen and their staffs to support pro-Soviet and socialist policies, as well as other policies opposed to American interests. For example, IPS's "Housing and Property" seminar promoted preferential mortgage-lending policies for nonwhite minorities who were underrepresented among homeowners. One such seminar in 1969 -- which brought together speakers from big-city tenants councils, neighborhood legal services, FHA insurance, savings-and-loans entities, and the Shannon and Luchs Realty Company -- was among the earliest in a long chain of events that would eventually result in the U.S. housing crisis of 2008. Also in 1969, IPS conducted "Experimental Education" seminars for federal legislators and their aides; a notable guest speaker at these events was Bill Ayers, a Weather Underground leader.

In the 1960s IPS sponsored the Venceremos Brigades, which, organized and trained in guerrilla warfare techniques by Fidel Castro's intelligence agency, covertly took hundreds of young Americans to Cuba to help harvest sugar cane and interact with Havana’s Communist revolutionary leadership. Cora Weiss, meanwhile, helped establish the radical disarmament group Women Strike for Peace, which, throughout the Cold War, sought to block American efforts to develop a nuclear deterrent against Soviet aggression.

From its beginning, the young IPS disseminated much of its ideology by way of numerous “front” groups and spin-offs masquerading as educational institutes. When a new issue emerged in the '60s or '70s -- feminism, for example, or a NATO upgrade -- new IPS fronts and spin-offs sprang up seemingly overnight, like mushrooms. Most of them had IPS figures as board members, officers, or fellows. Many were mere shadow organizations, existing in name only -- possibly nothing more than a box of letterhead and a few titles to use in full-page newspaper ads protesting U.S. policies -- for the purpose of making the left-wing movement appear to be more extensive than it actually was. To enhance one another's perceived credibility, these phantom organizations (which often shared the same mailing address) routinely referred to each other, cited each other's positions and research, etc. Such IPS spin-offs were (and continue to be) often short-lived, targeting specific policy issues in the name of broad causes (peace, etc.). When the issues changed, the organizations disappeared. American officials were bewildered by the number, the sudden appearances, and the proliferation of such groups.

Other IPS spin-offs, by contrast, were viable and enduring entities unto themselves.

One such group was the Liberation News Service (LNS), founded with IPS assistance in 1967. It served as a news source for hundreds of "alternative" publications with openly pro-Marxist perspectives. Most notably, LNS became a disinformation tool for the North Vietnamese Communists. According to author David Armstrong, LNS had "worldwide contacts among Western radical groups and Third World guerrilla forces." (By the early 1980s, LNS would be defunct.)

Still another anti-war disinformation front, the Dispatch News Service (DNS), was established in 1968. Funding for DNS was arranged by Philip Stern, chairman of the IPS board of trustees. Philip Stern was the son of Edith Stern, who in 1961 created the Stern Fund -- a New York-based family foundation that provided a significant share of IPS's own, early funding.

The W.E.B. DuBois School of Marxist Studies was a Communist Party USA front seeking “to organize the people and to spread as widely as possible a knowledge of Marxism as the Science of Social Change.”

The North American Congress on Latin America was created in 1966 as a New Left intelligence-gathering agency.

The Middle East Research and Information Project was begun in 1971 by IPS fellow Joe Stork, who is now a director of Human Rights Watch.

In 1973, IPS established an Amsterdam-based international subsidiary organization known as the Transnational Institute (TNI), an anti-corporate network with hundreds of affiliates worldwide. Today TNI collaborates with labor unions, churches, environmental groups and other activist entities to slash corporate profits and dismantle the free market. This mission is in the tradition of what Marcus Raskin and Michigan Congressman John Conyerswrote in a 1979 New York Times op-ed piece which they co-authored: "Government’s responsibility is to revitalize the nation’s economy through creative forms of public ownership."

IPS has long been as hostile toward U.S. intelligence agencies as it is toward capitalism and the American military. In 1970 Marcus Raskin told the group Federal Employees for Peace that “government agencies such as the FBI, Secret Service, intelligence services of other government agencies, and the military should be done away with, in that order.” The Center for National Security Studies (CNSS) was a 1974 IPS spinoff and strove to compromise the effectiveness of U.S. intelligence agencies. In 1975 Morton Halperin became the director of CNSS.

Meanwhile, the Transnational Institute (which IPS had created in 1973) came to the aid of Philip Agee, a onetime CIA agent who had since allied himself with Fidel Castro's Cuban intelligence apparatus. In 1975 Agee published Inside the Company: CIA Diary, a book revealing the identities of some 250 CIA operatives, one of whom was subsequently murdered. Agee then promptly took refuge in Britain; but when Britain announced soon thereafter that it planned to expel Agee, the Transnational Institute invited him to Amsterdam.

According to The New York Times, "[Agee's] example inspired several more books and magazines, including the Covert Action Information Bulletin, written by close associates and sometimes with Mr. Agee’s help, which published the names and often the addresses of hundreds more agency officers working under cover around the world."

Some of the noteworthy organizations that were launched and/or financed by IPS during the seventies and eighties included the following:

The progressive magazine Mother Jones, founded in 1975 by the IPS spinoff, Foundation for National Progress

The socialist journal In These Times, established in 1976 and funded by IPS until 1982

The Institute for Food and Development Policy (a.k.a. Food First), which has spent years finding fault with the quality of America's food gifts to the Third World and helped give rise to Medea Benjamin’s organization, Global Exchange

The Council on Economic Priorities, which received IPS money with a view to exposing corporate skullduggery and passing judgment on companies' social conscience

Between the mid-1970s and early 1980s, scores of ostensibly independent organizations shared many of IPS's major policy views; sometimes these groups actually grew out of IPS or were founded by key IPS leaders. in many cases, the groups shared officers, board members, fellows, and rank-and-file members with the Institute. To view a list of many groups, both transient and long-enduring, that were allied with IPS during the '70s and early '80s, click here.

Also during this period, Cora Weiss played a leading role in many IPS activities, particularly those involving opposition to U.S. and NATO military and defense policies in the name of "peace" and "disarmament." She headed one of IPS's most successful operations: its association with the famous Rockefeller-built Riverside Church in Manhattan, thereby exploiting the church's distinguished reputation to enhance her own projects. In 1978 Weiss was invited by Riverside's liberal activist minister, William Sloane Coffin, to run the church's disarmament program, which, in the name of "peace," sought to help consolidate Soviet nuclear superiority in Europe. In 1982 Weiss helped organize the largest pro-disarmament demonstration ever held. Staged in New York City, the rally was attended by a coalition of communist organizations. During her decade-long tenure at Riverside, which was situated across the street from the headquarters of the National Council of Churches, Weiss regularly received Russian KGB agents, Sandinista friends, and Cuban intelligence agents.

In a 1978 National Review article, Brian Crozier, director of the London-based Institute for the Study of Conflict, wrote: “The IPS is the perfect intellectual front for Soviet activities which would be resisted if they were to originate openly from the KGB.” Five years later, 12 U.S. senators and 70 members of the House of Representatives signed a letter to then-Secretary of State George Shultz describing IPS as an organization "which has for 20 years consistently supported foreign policy objectives that serve the interests of the Soviet Union."

In Target America: The Influence of Communist Propaganda on U.S. Media -- James L. Tyson's 1981 expose of the Soviet Union's massive "propaganda campaign designed to weaken and demoralize America from the inside"[1] -- the author states that then-IPS fellow Saul Landau "figured prominently" in "anti-intelligence activity and elsewhere in the work of the Far-Left Lobby." Tyson reveals that Landau, in a letter to a friend in Cuba, once wrote: "I think that at age 40 the time has come to dedicate myself to narrower pursuits, namely, making propaganda for American Socialism ... we cannot any longer just help out third world movements and revolutions, although obviously we shouldn't turn our backs on them, but get down to the more difficult job of bringing the message home." On other occasions, Landau advocated on behalf of "Revolutionary Socialism."[2] (Now an author and filmmaker, Landau remains an IPS senior fellow to this day.)

Throughout the 1980s, IPS continued to undermine American efforts to combat Communism and Soviet interests. In 1985, for instance, as President Reagan pressed Congress to fund the Contras, anti-Communists who were fighting the Communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, IPS fellow Peter Kornbluh arranged for Senators Tom Harkin (an IPS board member at the time) and John Kerry to fly to Managua to meet with Sandinista leaders. Persuaded by the Kerry-Harkin report on the allegedly happy atmosphere in Managua, Congress denied the funding for the Contras, though it reversed itself a few weeks later when Sandinista President Daniel Ortega met with his Soviet friends in the Kremlin.

Also in the '80s, as President Reagan built up American defenses and promoted the missile-defense program popularly known as "Star Wars," IPS was closely linked to many of the Left's most prominent anti-war and anti-nuclear groups. Among these were Business Executives for National Security, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), European Nuclear Disarmament, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Nuclear Research and Information Service, Promoting Enduring Peace, and the World Information Service on Energy.

IPS's involvement in the various anti-nuclear and peace movements of the 1970s and 1980s, coupled with its crusade against "corporate-driven globalization," paved the way for the Institute to embrace the agendas of radical environmentalism following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in 1989-1991. By 2011, IPS would emphasize "the urgency of the climate crisis," the potential for "environmental collapse," and the need for "transformational policies" that could bring about "solutions to global warming" while "protecting the 'commons'."

The consistently anti-American positions adopted by IPS are frequently expressed in tandem with the Institute's condemnations of Israel. In February 2005, for instance, IPS fellow Phyllis Bennis published a commentary depicting the United States as a cynical manipulator seeking only to extract favorable deals for its ally, Israel, no matter how negatively those arrangements might affect the Palestinians. Bennis further denounced Israel for its efforts to “demolish Palestinian homes" (a reference to IDF demolitions of the homes of Palestinian terrorists and their enablers); for its "assassination policy" (a reference to IDF's targeted killings of Palestinian terrorist leaders); and for its "land-grab known as the Apartheid Wall" (i.e., the anti-terror security barrier designed to stop the infiltration of suicide bombers from the West Bank).

Central to IPS's worldview is its unyielding opposition to free-market economies. Viewing capitalism as a breeding ground for “unrestrained greed,” IPS claims that it seeks, through its reports and programs, to "create a more responsible society." In their 2004 book Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World Is Possible, IPS director John Cavanagh and IPS board president Jerry Mander called capitalism "a system in crisis," and they appealed to "an alliance of leading activists, scholars, economists, researchers, and writers" to take up the ideological cudgel against globalization. Similar sentiments have been purveyed by such IPS-affiliated scholars and ideologues as Norman Birnbaum (a New Left sociologist), Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Richard Falk, and Gore Vidal.

IPS's current major campaigns are listed below, along with their stated objectives. The actual, underlying agendas of these campaigns, however, are to depict America as a nation that: abuses nonwhite minorities and the poor; seeks to bully the rest of mankind militarily; creates immense suffering both at home and abroad through its capitalist economic tradition; and countenances industrial practices that inflict great harm on the natural environment.

The Break The Chain Campaign seeks "to prevent and address the abuse and exploitation of migrant women workers through holistic direct services, leadership training, community engagement and survivor-driven outreach and training."

Cities for Peace "is building a network of local elected officials who are working to highlight the local costs of U.S. foreign policy and to put pressure on the U.S. government to end the war in Iraq, prevent a military strike against Iran, and press for a non-militarized foreign policy."

Cities for Progress is "a growing network of locally-elected officials and community-based activists working together for social change."

The Drug Policy Project "combines scholarship with activism to transform drug control policy both at home and abroad. The Project works with the grassroots, media, and policy makers to shift away from the drug 'war' paradigm and its disastrous impacts on the environment toward holistic policies that address public health and safety."

Foreign Policy In Focus is a project that "connects the research and action of more than 600 scholars, advocates, and activists seeking to make the United States a more responsible global partner."

The Global Economy Project produces books, articles, films, and educational materials designed to "strengthe[n] citizen responses to the global economy."

The New Economy Working Group seeks "to address the social and environmental imperatives and opportunities of the 21st Century," focusing especially on "economic justice, environmental sustainability, and peace."

The New Internationalism project, which was introduced in 1996 and is directed by Phyllis Bennis, reflects IPS's stated faith in the righteousness of the United Nations. Focused on "education and activism aiming to change the failed and failing U.S. policies," this initiative strives "to challenge U.S. domination of the UN" while "help[ing] democratize and empower the global organization." In fact, the ultimate goal is to hamstring American foreign policy and bring it under the control of the UN -- an objective founded upon the premise that the United States is a rogue nation that poses a grave threat to international peace and stability. Phyllis Bennis made this point succinctly in a 2002 article in which she asked: "Haven't we -- and the rest of the world -- had enough of Washington's rogue behavior?" Bennis has long been the embodiment of the critics who, as former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick put it, "always blame America first."

The Nuclear Policy Project focuses on three issues: "strategic integration of nuclear material management into nuclear arsenal reductions and ending production of nuclear explosives; accountability of the nuclear weapons states to their citizens relative to social, environmental, safety, and health impacts; and structural collapse of Cold War nuclear institutions."

The OtherWords project, formerly known as Minuteman Media, "distributes commentary and cartoons aimed at making progressive analysis more ubiquitous in the national conversation." This project sends a weekly editorial package -- free-of-charge and publication-ready -- to some 1,700 newspaper editors.

The Paths for Reconstruction in the 21st Century project "links knowledge to the betterment of the human condition through thinking and practical action." The project is "based on the assumption that a renaissance of moral action and thought is on the immediate horizon."

The Sustainable Energy and Economy Network "works in partnership with citizens groups nationally and globally on environment, human rights and development issues with a particular focus on energy, climate change, environmental justice, gender equity, and economic issues, particularly as these play out in North-South relations."